Manchester Memoirs, Vol. Ixvi. (1922), No. 3 19 



J. G. Lawson (18, 87-8) contributes the Greek evidence : — 



"In Northern Arcadia I also learnt that the flesh of the 

 pig, in respect of which the ordinary Grseculus fully deserves 

 the epithet esuriens, is taboo ; and the result of eating it is 

 Believed to be leprosy. It might be supposed that this 

 superstition has resulted from contact with Mohammedans ; 

 but such an explanation would not account for the confine- 

 ment of it to one locality — and that a mountainous and 

 unprofitable district where intercourse with the Turks must 

 have been small ; and further the Greek would surely have 

 found a malicious pleasure, the most piquant of sauces, in 

 eating that which offended the two peoples whom he most 

 abhors, Turks and Jews. On the other hand, if we suppose 

 the fear of swine's flesh to be a piece of native tradition, its 

 origin may well be sought in the ritual observances of the 

 cult of Demeter and her daughter, to whom the pig was 

 sacred and in whose honour it was sacrificed once only in 

 each year, a^ the festival of Thesmophoria (Schol. in Ar. 

 Ran 441. ^lian, Hist. Anirn., v, 16). There are many 

 instances among different peoples of the belief that skin 

 -diseases, especially leprosy, are the punishment visited upon 

 those who eat of the sacred or unclean animal ; for the 

 distinction between sacred and unclean is not made until a 

 primitive sense of awe is inclined bv conscious reasoning in 

 the direction either of reverence or of abhorrence (9, 44 ei 

 seq.). Thus in Egypt, the land from which the Pelasgians, 

 if Herodotus (ii, 171) might be believed, derived the worship 

 of Demeter, it was held that the drinker of pig's milk 

 incurred leprosy (^lian, loc. cit.); and we may reasonably 

 suppose that the same punishment threatened those Egyp- 

 tians who tasted of pig's flesh, save at their one annual 

 festival when this was enjoined (Herod., ii, 47 ; Plutarch, 

 Isis et Osiris, 8; Moral, 354; ^lian, loc. cit.). Now the 

 Thesmophoria resembled the Egyptian festival in that it 

 was an annual occasion for sacrificing pigs and for partak- 

 ing therefore of their flesh ; if then the worshippers of 

 Demeter, like the Egyptians, were forbidden to use the pig 

 for food at other times, and if the penalty for disobedience 

 in Greece too was believed to be leprosy, the present case of 

 taboo in Arcadia — the only one known to me in modern 

 Greece — mav be a survival from the ancient cult." 



The annual pig feast mav have been held once a year in 

 ancient Scotland. As much is suggested by a statement made 



